First, I've "enjoyed" all the "suggestions" that have been and are being made in this topic so conveniently called "Suggestion List". Make of that what you will.

Now I would like to make a suggestion of my own. How about doing a podcast featuring Terence Witt? If you do not know him he is a visiting scientist at the Florida Institute of Technology doing research on his new theory--Null Physics. He has presented this completed theory in his book, "Our Undiscovered Universe: Introducing Null Physics - The Science of Uniform and Unconditional Reality". I have purchased this book and am currently digesting it. It is an interesting perspective and I would absolutely love to listen to a podcast with him discussing some of the ideas in Null Physics.

-----Addendum------

There have been many negative reviews about this book all coming from people that have never read the book itself. To my knowledge there has not been any negative reviews from people who have read Our Undiscovered Universe. This only makes me want to hear from the author himself that much more.

I entirely lack the technical knowledge to conduct such an interview or to determine if Witt's arguments are sound. I appreciate parts of his arguments about science lacking the ability to explain foundations given its current paradigms, but the rest is over my head. Anyone interested in a discussion of this subject matter would do far better to read the discussion and critiques of Witt's views at the James Randi Forum.

How about recommending some sort of comedian to come on to the show, issuing the foundations of humour and laughter and where it might come from, such as the rooting of how we say we have fun casually on a day to day basis.

I think you need to read some of Sim's writings, specifically his Torah commentaries and cosmology double issue from Cerebus, to help you know where he is coming from. His being a cartoonist has as much of an effect on how he communicates Truth as his reading of the Torah, Gospels and Koran has. It is cartoon-like, yet not lacking in depth.

Please do. I'll try to see the world through they eyes of a cartoonist.

If that view is the view of an "experimentalist", who tries not to make pre-judgements about the world, but lets things form as they may, on their own account, then I think it has some merit - otherwise, at its worst, it is the view of a child.

U people make me laugh! But not is a happy laugh, what i see is nothing to be happy about, im saying about WORSHIP, im see a lot of worship here at GF, not of the gods but of men! Men you not even met!So i suggest all you advanced people cut back on your worship of other advanced people, well at least dont do this in the public, i think may be contageous! Its just sickning to watch, ego is having a field day. ok suggestion over.

Overall its worrying he's such an Intelligent Design enthusiast, as the whole topic is more like one big Knee-Jerk. For example Langan argues that:

No universe that exists or evolves strictly as a function of external determinacy, randomness or an alternation of the two can offer much in the way of meaning. Where freedom and volition are irrelevant, so is much of human experience and individuality.

This is merely a sentiment as it's for him becoming irrelevant when freedom and volition are questioned. This doesn't mean it's something that humans couldn't conceive of without dropping dead or becoming zombies. So it looks like an a priori statement of belief that is precluded from the serious rational approach in the other material. Perhaps IQ-tests published in sci-fi magazines are not that much of an indicator after all...

Materialism arbitrarily excludes the possibility that reality has a meaningful nonmaterial aspect, objectivism arbitrarily excludes the possibility that reality has a meaningful subjective aspect, and although Cartesian dualism technically excludes neither, it arbitrarily denies that the mental and material, or subjective and objective, sides of reality share common substance.

This sounds also more like an emotional appeal: nonmaterial aspects are not really 'excluded', they are explored just as well within a context of mental, subjective phenomenons. It's more like 'super-material', as these phenomenons seems super-imposed on a material substrate, not meaning it cannot interact macroscopically with other super-materialist causes and effects. And yes, meaning might only be relevant on macroscopic, super-material scale, and disappear within the microscopic by its very definition.

It's this same desire, also present with Iolaus at this forum, that science should incorporate metaphysics to become more complete, more whole. To me this just seems like one huge category error.

But these quotes only reveal some of the weaker aspects of Langan's underlying thoughts. There's still a lot of good fundamental stuff, so right on target that it's puzzling why he would mention 'intelligent design' at all.

Reality theory is about the stage of attribution in which two predicates analogous to true and false, namely real and unreal, are ascribed to various statements about the real universe. In this sense, it is closely related to sentential logic. In particular, sentential logic has four main properties to be emulated by reality theory. The first is absolute truth; as the formal definition of truth, it is true by definition. The other properties are closure, comprehensiveness and consistency.

Reality, i.e. the real universe, contains all and only that which is real. The reality concept is analytically self-contained; if there were something outside reality that were real enough to affect or influence reality, it would be inside reality, and this contradiction invalidates any supposition of an external reality (up to observational or theoretical relevance).

Since logic is the theory of truth, the way to construct a fully verifiable theory is to start with logic and develop the theory by means of rules or principles under which truth is heritable. Because truth is synonymous with logical tautology, this means developing the theory by adjoining rules which themselves have a tautological structure - i.e., which are universal, closed and consistent - and logically extracting the implications. A theory of reality constructed in this way is called a supertautology.

If this is enough to make him into an interesting guest I don't know. Why this need to incorporate existential and philosophical ideas into science, extending science while it should be clear science already descends from the philosophical, meta-logical or 'supertautological'? Perhaps this lineage is not clear to everyone but still.

Sum Contrapositum wrote:First, I've "enjoyed" all the "suggestions" that have been and are being made in this topic so conveniently called "Suggestion List". Make of that what you will.

Now I would like to make a suggestion of my own. How about doing a podcast featuring Terence Witt? If you do not know him he is a visiting scientist at the Florida Institute of Technology doing research on his new theory--Null Physics. He has presented this completed theory in his book, "Our Undiscovered Universe: Introducing Null Physics - The Science of Uniform and Unconditional Reality". I have purchased this book and am currently digesting it. It is an interesting perspective and I would absolutely love to listen to a podcast with him discussing some of the ideas in Null Physics.

-----Addendum------

There have been many negative reviews about this book all coming from people that have never read the book itself. To my knowledge there has not been any negative reviews from people who have read Our Undiscovered Universe. This only makes me want to hear from the author himself that much more.

Do not bother. This crackpot book has been reviewed by pepole who actually read it.

Also see my review at http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~fiski/ouu_review.htmlThe flaws of this crackpot book are many and include:Redefining the concept of infinity as a length with magnitude.Defining a line as a series of points written as zeros, treating them as numbers so that they add up to zero and then treating the number zero as a point again!A really bad atomic model "proving" that a electron orbiting a proton has a ground state that it cannot decay from by creating a new physical law.Using the high school description of a neutron as a proton plus an electron and not realizing that this is just his atomic model!Postulating that galaxies have "galactic cores" which are super massive objects that are not quite black holes and not realizing that the centre of the Milky Way is well observed. These recycle stars into hydrogen. Oddly enough astronomers have not noticed dozens of stars vanishing from the galactic centre in the many images that they have taken over the last few decades.